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Bezig met laden... A Long Way Down (origineel 2005; editie 2006)door Nick Hornby (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkDe lange weg naar beneden. Roman door Nick Hornby (2005)
Top Five Books of 2020 (139) » 10 meer 2000s decade (34) Books Read in 2006 (21) Books Read in 2017 (1,856) Books Read in 2015 (2,210) Books Read in 2019 (3,363) Unread books (709) Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. I laughed out loud reading this book. It is about 4 people who meet on the night they are each going to commit suicide. I know it doesnt sound funny but it was honest and funny and a great read. It does have a lot of bad language in it but they are in England and somehow the F word doesnt sound as bad if you imagine it with an english accent. Go figure. ( ) I started this hoping for some light reading. I quite enjoyed the author's 'About a Boy' although there was more bad language than I was comfortable with. But the book opens with four unlikeable people, all thinking about ending their lives, in a cold-blooded way. This is not my idea of a setting for comedy. I looked at a few reviews, and saw that readers are divided between finding this hilarious, or rather sordid. I suspect my opinion would be with the latter group, so decided to abandon it. If I was rating this book on how much I enjoyed it alone, it would be 1 star. But I gave Hornby partial credit for a modicum of originality and wit. Mostly for the wit. Maureen, Martin, JJ, and Jess meet at the top of a tower, each with the intent to jump off it and end their own life. The book is narrated from all four perspectives and follows the four as they each make a different choice. I guess this book would be classified as black humor, but frankly while it was dark, the characters were so unsympathetic by and large that you really didn't care. And while there were some witty moments, there weren't enough to save the book. Not even close. My first criticism is that I seriously felt at the end of the book that two of the four characters really should have jumped. That's how unlikable and unsympathetic they were. One of them, Jess, was also grating and annoying. In addition, all four voices were extremely similar. If you are going to write in the first person from four perspectives, the voices can't all sound like the authors voice. Finally, it was just a boring book. To be at all worthwhile or engaging, you really would have to care about the characters on some level, but there's almost no opportunity. Maureen is the most sympathetic, but I never really felt her pain. I never felt any of their pain. They were all presumably conflicted, but they all just came across as incredibly self involved. After 100 pages, I really didn't want to finish this one, but I forced myself. And it didn't improve one bit. In fact, there was one scene, an "intervention" of sorts, and that was really when the book should have been just tossed to the side. Just totally not my thing. I had looked forward to reading this because I thought it was going to be a funny book. (I know suicide isn't funny) but the premise of this sounded like a fun read. It wasn't fun, but it was thought-provoking. A couple of characters were totally annoying, but even they give us something to think about.
...Hornby doesn't confuse the simplicity of this thought with the impossibility of sometimes living it. For all his light touches, he is never superficial enough to suggest that these lives that have fallen apart, in four of the millions of ways lives may do so, can easily be patched up and renewed. Whatever limited consolations the book's survivors find in each other, Hornby resists melodramatic resolutions or glorious moments of redemption, and he doesn't smuggle away or refute all the reasons his characters took with them to the rooftop where they met, the ones that urged them toward the edge rather than down to the ground the slow way, back into the world. PrijzenOnderscheidingenErelijsten
Meet Martin, JJ, Jess, and Maureen. Four people who come together on New Year's Eve: a former TV talk show host, a musician, a teenage girl, and a mother. Three are British, one is American. They encounter one another on the roof of Topper's House, a London destination famous as the last stop for those ready to end their lives. This is a tale of connections made and missed, punishing regrets, and the grace of second chances. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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